Behavioural Science
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Category: Social Psychology

8 essays

Forget the Cinderella effect: stepparents are just as likely to kill their biological children as their stepchildren

By Tim O’Mahony Operations Manager at Kexue Communications, [http://www.kexuecommunications.com](http://www.kexuecommunications.com) Researchers have known since the early 1970s that children in stepfamilies are at greater risk of child abuse and murder (Fergusson, Fleming & O’Neill, 1972). A team of Swedish researchers has found that parents in stepfamilies are equally likely to kill their biological children as they […]

Universal Self-Enhancement Reloaded: A Battle of Definitions and Paradigms

Some time ago I gave my thoughts about the battle of panculturalists vs. universalists with regard to self-enhancement. This is take II, which goes much more in depth and explores the story by examining the two key players in the discussion and there scientific battle in the different journals. Self-enhancement describes a range of psychological […]

Self-Enhancement: A Universal Process with Culture-Specific Content?

The individual is the smallest entity, that can arise from any group-division. The word individual actually means “that which is un/(in)-dividable”. Thus the meaning of the individual is closely connected to the group, because the individual only gets meaning in the context of the group. In the same way that the individual gains meaning from […]

Questions about “The Self”

In recent times there has been a lot of discussion with regard to social psychology constructs such as self-esteem, self-determination and self-affirmation. Due to rapidly changing societies and new insights into cognitive processes of memory formation some old theories of self-psychology have recently been challenged. For example Heine, Lehman, Markus and Kitayama (1999) postulated that […]

Are We Strangers to Ourselves?

Who are you? Okay…easy enough question, but get this one: How do you know who you are? Do you get it right? So many times I meet people that tell me all about them and how they are and when I finally get to know them, they seem to do quite the opposite of what […]

Ego Depletion & Executive Functioning

Executive functioning is the mental ability to control and manage cognitive processes. It is a theoretical cognitive system that involves processes such as attention, abstract thinking, rule acquisition, initiating appropriate actions and inhibiting inappropriate actions and selecting relevant sensory information. Executive functioning is sometimes called central executive or cognitive control and plays an important role […]